Berklee College of Music, says that synthesizers have offered a very significant contribution to the way music is played beyond the sounds they create: Form no longer has to follow function. Acoustic instruments like guitars, cymbals, and clarinets have to be built a certain way to get a very particular sound. “With electronic instruments — […]
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(Phys.org) —Robotic hands designed and engineered for versatility and dexterity in handling harmful, harmless, small, large, light, and heavy objects tease robotics teams today. The US government’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is getting attention this month in its steps forward to develop robotic hands that can do the jobs of the human hand’s advanced movements, but capable of being built at less prohibitive costs.
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Holographic memory systems have been around for decades. They offer far more storage capacity than CDs and DVDs — even “next-generation” DVDs like Blu-ray — and their transfer rates leave conventional discs in the dust. So why haven’t we all been using holographic memory for years now? There are several hurdles that have been holding
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(Phys.org) —Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have used stop-motion technology to capture gait primitives of real animals—the data captured was then used to allow a small quadruped robot to walk and trot like a real horse. The team describes their project in their paper published in Biological Cybernetics.
Closed captioning can be extremely helpful in at least three different situations: It has been a great boon to hearing-impaired television viewers. It can also be helpful in noisy environments. For example, a TV in a noisy airport terminal can display closed captioning and still be usable Some people use captions to learn English or
On television, how does closed captioning work? Read More »
Nematic Phase Liquid Crystals Just as there are many varieties of solids and liquids, there is also a variety of liquid crystal substances. Depending on the temperature and particular nature of a substance, liquid crystals can be in one of several distinct phases (see below). In this article, we will discuss liquid crystals in the
The Game Boy Advance is a major leap for the Game Boy line. It is the first to have a horizontal alignment, and it is 17 times faster than the Game Boy Color, which was released in 1998. Read this edition of HowStuffWorks to find out what’s under the hood of the Game Boy Advance
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Joysticks pull off a really neat trick. They take something entirely physical — the movement of your hand — and translate it into something entirely mathematical — a string of ones and zeros (the language of computers). With a good joystick, the translation is so flawless that you completely forget about it. When you’re really
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Inside the capacitor, the terminals connect to two metal plates separated by a non-conducting substance, or dielectric. You can easily make a capacitor from two pieces of aluminum foil and a piece of paper. It won’t be a particularly good capacitor in terms of its storage capacity, but it will work. In theory, the dielectric
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Cell-phone Frequencies In the dark ages before cell phones, people who really needed mobile-communications ability installed radio telephones in their cars. In the radio-telephone system, there was one central antenna tower per city, and perhaps 25 channels available on that tower. This central antenna meant that the phone in your car needed a powerful transmitter
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